A lot of people claim that the gateway drug to the Japanese RPG is Pokemon. I tend to agree with this, and publishers have made the attempt to lure in those young users with titles to take them onto the next step once they get a little older and past the Pokemon age. This usually involves a few rules. First, it has to be a handheld title. What better way to get your product in the hands of children than with the Trojan horse that is already in all their backpacks, the Nintendo DS. They have it for Pokemon, so all they have to do is buy your game. The difficult part is making it appealing. They won’t want just any JRPG.
This brings us to a flurry of rules that will make the game a must-buy, or I suppose a must-ask-for. This means it should include all, or some of the following: a large bestiary, a way to interact with friends, and appealing characters. Square has made an attempt at doing this with Dragon Quest. Maybe they thought that as the youth got older they would say “hey, when I was a kid I really liked Dragon Quest Monsters. Maybe I’d like these normal Dragon Quest games now.” Square has been trying this since the Game Boy. There’s no telling if it has worked, but what we can say for sure is that Pokemon sells way more than Dragon Quest titles in North America. What is difficult for me to understand is why Nintendo remains idle in making an attempt to make the JRPG popular outside of Japan.
Nintendo publishes Pokemon. They make a ton of money off of it. In Japan, it’s pretty much an ageless game, however in North America the demographic is almost all young children. I’m well aware adults buy Pokemon, and even I pick up the occasional title from the series, but it definitely does not transcend age like it does in the east. Wouldn’t they want to increase their demographic?
They might not be able to do that with Pokemon, but you figure they’d want to at least keep kids interested in the JRPG so that they’ll want to buy lots of those titles later on for Nintendo consoles, of which many are published by Nintendo, including the most recent installment of Dragon Quest. So what I’m getting at is that there needs to be a series that appeals to all ages.
Oh wait, there already is one: Mother. Mother is the perfect opportunity to transition kids who love Pokemon to more advanced JRPGs, and it will also sell to adults, especially those of us who have been waiting to see a resurgence of the series in North America.
This wouldn’t be old news, either. Only Mother 2 ever officially came out in North America in the form of Earthbound. It’s been about 15 years since that big box with the scratch-and-sniff stickers came out, so it certainly won’t be any sort of quick re-release. For all I care Nintendo can pretend that this is a brand new series, and start with the first. If any adjustments need to be made, it would be with the first game. It’s fairly difficult for a “gateway” JRPG, and really needs to be tweaked a bit to more resemble the second and third games, which has mostly been taken care of for the Japan-only release of Mother 1+2 for the GBA.
In fact most of the work has been taken care of here. Sure there will have to be tweaks made to get the games out on a new format, probably a DS cartridge, and that will involve some dev costs, but not as much as creating a brand new game. There is already an official translation of the first two games, and an unofficial translation of the third, which I imagine could become official fairly quickly and cheaply. So along with that, packaging the product and then marketing, they’re done. It just seems that Nintendo doesn’t want to make the effort because of a botched release that happened in the 90s.
With the right marketing, this could become a success in North America, and would not only mean sales of those three games, but sales of further JRPGs, and that would be a much needed breath of life for the sluggish Japanese games industry.
